In new office buildings, and in many older buildings, the furniture and interior walls are being made easily movable to accommodate personnel relocation and organizational change. In such offices, communications wiring cannot be placed within hollow partitions or attached to permanent walls as has been common practice in buildings with permanent interior walls. At the same time, there has been an ever increasing use of carpeting, usually in the form of carpet squares, to cover the floors in office buildings.
A lack of permanent walls and the use of carpeting has led to an increasing use of flat multi-conductor cable which is applied to the floor prior to carpeting and which runs to a permanent wall or to a hollow column that is a permanent part of the building, where it is connected to a more conventional communication cable. Out on the floor, the end of the under carpet cable is connected to a conventional telephone connector which extends through the carpet where a desk is to be positioned. Addition or movement of a communication cable to accommodate a new office arrangement is simply accomplished by lifting the carpet squares along the path necessary to lay the new cable, applying the new cable and replacing the carpet squares that were removed. The application of a cable in a new installation prior to any carpeting being applied and the application of a cable to a floor where carpet squares have been removed are both herein referred to as applying a communication to a floor prior to carpeting the floor.
The prior art includes several under carpet flat cables that are manufactured, rolled into specified lengths and then unrolled by the workman and applied to the floor prior to carpeting. Such cables are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,219,928; 4,319,075; and 4,283,593. In applying these cables the workman must get down on his hands and knees on the floor to apply the cable to the floor. Moreover, to change the direction of the cable run it is necessary to fold the cable upon itself thereby increasing the thickness of the material under the carpet. The fold also produces an area where the cable is sharply bent upon itself and the conductors may be broken by people walking over it or moving objects across it unless special precautions are taken to protect the fold back areas.